Last year Sport England announced it would be spending £85m on The Talent Plan For England. The idea behind the Talent Plan is to create “the world’s best talent plan” – a shoot-for-the-moon ambition that becomes more achievable if you accept the rather pedantic objection that a Talent Plan is something you’ve just made up, and thus, technically, nobody else in the world has one anyway.
What is certain is that the Talent Plan has a lot to say about talent, so much that its 35-page outline mentions it 258 times in total. This is the big takeaway from the Talent Plan: talent is definitely very important. To be clear, nobody here is suggesting we don’t care about talent. It is a doubly interesting read given one unarguable truth about talent is that nobody seems to know exactly how it works. It has even become fashionable in coaching circles to say talent is overrated, that it is a kind of chimera.
Talent deceives you. Talent introduces notions of aesthetics, grace, intangible possibilities. Mike Atherton has noted that he spent his England career hearing how baffling it was that “more talented players” had failed repeatedly while he, Atherton, somehow grubbed his way to more than 7,000 Test runs – none of which were evidence of talent, which generally looks a little more dreamy and free-flowing old chap.
So you leaf on though the Talent Plan hoping for clues, through Talent Research and Talent Insight, through the role of the coach-developer within the context of the talent pathway, through positive talent development experience for all stakeholders, until finally the Talent Plan asks the big one: “What is talent?” Breathlessly, you scan down looking for the payoff. “Athletes deemed as talented will be determined by an interaction between individual, environmental and task constraints,” the plan insists, choking a little, sweat breaking out on its brow. Finally it starts to shout, “TALENT CAN BE THOUGHT OF AS A MULTIDIMENSIONAL PACKAGE OF CHARACTERISTICS AND ABILITIES”.
At which point it becomes necessary to hurl your laptop across the room, adopt a José Mourinho scowl and think about Dele Alli for a bit, a footballer who really does have something to tell us about talent, expectation, and the limits of both.
It has been another intriguing week in Dele’s career. On Thursday he started against Shkendija and did OK for an hour. The high point was a run from the center circle that had him gliding magisterially through his own jet stream before shooting against a defender. The worst moment came as Shkendija took a goal-kick and Mourinho could be heard shouting “Dele. Attention Dele. Fucking hell”, urging a player who has been capped 32 times by England to remember the basic details of a pressing drill.
How did we get here, to a place where Dele’s career to date looks like an investigation into the idea of what talent actually is and how you make it work? There are those who will tell us he has simply found his level, that the media built him up unduly in his first two seasons at Spurs.
In reality Dele built himself up, winning the PFA young player gong two years in a row, and reaching a kind of peak three years ago in the 3-1 defeat of Real Madrid at Wembley. He scored twice that night, strode through a series of great, yawning holes in the Real defense, and looked the most thrillingly razor-edged presence on the pitch.
Dele was 21 years old. Madrid should have been a moment of ignition. Three years on Spurs are said to be looking for a way to cut their losses on a strangely diminished figure. Where did it go, that sense of joy, of skirling possibilities? Welcome to Dele Part Two: a mystery story.
At this point the presence of Mourinho feels entirely appropriate, a manager whose entire career could be seen as a reproachful assault on other people’s perceptions of what talent actually is and who seems at least as obsessed by this topic as Sport England.
When José starts calling you talented, that’s when you need to worry. The first sign Tanguy Ndombele needed to get cracking came when Mourinho could be heard describing him as “a player with great talent”.
Click. That’s one in the chamber. See also: Juan Mata at Chelsea (“everything is clear between us. He’s a talented player”); Anthony Martial (“He’s a talented player, everybody knows that”); and Eden Hazard just before the bad times (“Everyone knows he is a talented player”).
With Mourinho talent is a kind of codeword for inflated value and slack to be trimmed. It is also what makes Dele-José such a fascinating interaction and one that may not be done just yet.
At this point it is necessary to have some sympathy here for José the dream-stomper, who is, lest we forget, the manager of a team not a one-to-one coach.
For all his seductive moments, Alli is also a very needy talented player, for whom clear strengths are combined with clear weaknesses, and where the ability to score and assist effectively rests on being slotted into the most precisely accommodating team patterns.
He needs to be central. He needs to play as a No 10 but a running not a passing No 10. He needs a striker ahead of him. He needs players who can carry the ball to make space for his runs.
Some talent is more brittle and less adaptable than other talent. Perhaps it is simply a lesser talent as a result. Son Heung-min, incidentally, can also make those runs, and he’s pretty good at taking orders. It isn’t over for Alli by any means but time is passing and the list of those who have regained a stellar trajectory after years of drift is quite small.
For now he seems a hostage to the deceptive ease of his finest moments and to the overly linear notion that athletes always improve when in fact so many hit an early peak. And above all to the one thing we do know about this most thrillingly mysterious commodity, that nobody ever really has a plan.
(The Guardian)
